Tag: STR

• What’s next for Parkview Mountain House

  

  Since we first opened bookings for Parkview Mountain House, we have been using a third-party property manager. This seemed to make the most sense given our team is not local.

  But since then, we have learned that, along with the fees charged by Airbnb and VRBO, it’s simply too high a fee load. We also found it difficult to offer the exact hospitality experience we were after without full management control.

  So we have made the decision to terminate our management contract and transition the property to internalized management. What this will entail is taking on more management control (from Toronto) and having a local support team that we assemble and manage ourselves. This is underway and I’m personally enjoying getting further into the details of this business.

  What does this mean for bookings?

  Summer and fall remain open for bookings. But the winter season is now blocked off starting in early December. Expect an announcement this fall when it opens up. To stay in the loop, you can subscribe to this blog and also check off “Globizen Updates.”

  Are you local to Park City and SLC?

  In the meantime, if any of you live in the area and work in the hospitality, maintenance, or property management space, please drop us a line at pmh@globizen.com. We are currently assembling our local vendor team and we’d love to connect with you.

  I have a good feeling that it’s going to be an incredible winter season in Utah.

  2026.08.14

• Airbnb still has a lot of accommodations

  There are a lot of headwinds facing Airbnb. Cities around the world seem to be systematically making it more difficult to be a host. New York City, as many of you know, recently made it so that you need to be physically present while the dwelling is being rented. That is pretty limiting. Similar things are happening in non-urban markets too. North of Toronto in Muskoka, there’s a draft by-law that will, among other things, limit short-term rentals to 50% of the total number of days within certain time periods. That eliminates the possibility of doing this as a business. So in many ways, it’s easy to be pessimistic about the future of Airbnb.

  But at the same time, if you step back and look at the bigger picture, there are over 7 million active listings on Airbnb. This effectively makes it the largest hospitality brand in the world. There are more accommodations on Airbnb than with Marriott, Hilton, Intercontinental, Wyndham, and Hyatt combined. (The below chart is from Scott Galloway.) It’s also important to point out that while Airbnb doesn’t own any of its own supply, the same is true of most hotel brands. They are, brands. The difference is that Airbnb created a more scalable platform and a more decentralized approach to aggregating supply.

  

  The numbers also don’t suggest that things are slowing down for Airbnb. (Here’s their Q3 2023 shareholder letter.) Active listings on the platform grew 19% YoY in Q3 2023 (or by almost 1 million listings). Revenue is up. Free cash flow is up. And in Q3 of last year, the company repurchased $500 million of stock, bringing their one year total to somewhere around $3 billion. So despite all of the efforts to curb short-term rentals within our cities, the company, at least for now, seems to be holding up just fine. And if they can successfully diversify beyond their core business, there could even be reason to be bullish on the world’s largest hospitality brand.

  Full disclosure: I am long $ABNB.

  2024.01.18